Archive for May 12, 2018

The concept of “whiparound” coverage of a league’s games during an extended gameday window was pioneered in 2009 with NFL RedZone, a channel which blends together live footage and edited highlights pretty much in real time. It has been a great money-maker for the league and might be the one big reason why NFL attendance and TV ratings are down leaguewide.

There have been some attempts at imitation. ESPN’s Goal Line during college football Saturdays has been a fixture the last few years, MLB Network and Fox Sports 1 have had prime-time coverage of multiple games in their lineups, and Major League Soccer broadcast a five-hour show with a panoply of analysts and guests with whiparound coverage of the opening day of the season, called FirstKick.

This weekend is seeing the final weekend of play of two prominent European soccer leagues which are broadcast on American broadcast channels. Fox, Fox Sports 1, Fox Sports 2, and Fox Soccer Plus shared coverage of the final day of the German Bundesliga.

The best footage, however, was on FS2. The network showed whiparound coverage of all of the final nine games of the first division of the Bundesliga, showing the drama and late goals that determined which teams would play in the UEFA Champions League next fall, which teams would be in the Europa League, and which teams would be relegated to Bundesliga 2.

Tomorrow, the English Premier League has its turn on 10 networks owned by Comcast/NBC. There’s a bit less drama in the EPL than there was in the Bundesliga today because Swansea needs to win and have a bit of help in order avoid the drop to the second division, and the European places have been pretty much decided.

If you want to do something like that for women’s lacrosse as eight octofinal games are played tomorrow, you need some technology in your favor. Most of these games will be available only through you computer, meaning that you will have to run a cable through to an HDMI or even an old RGB cable in order to get a full viewing experience.